My company uses Wordpress for a lot of client projects. For us, it has many positives: It’s free, flexible, and easy to modify. Its huge library of plugins makes it great for quick-turn projects. Perhaps most importantly, its WYSIWYG editor makes it easy for clients and nontechnical staff to enter and edit content, without the involvement of web developers.

But recently, I’ve been wondering if that last positive isn’t quite so positive after all. While the WYSIWYG editor takes a great deal of effort off the shoulders of the designer/developer, what cost are we enduring by losing so much of the power and flexibility of HTML itself?

Much of the brilliance and power of HTML comes from markup that is difficult or entirely unavailable in today’s WYSIWYG editors. Elements like <abbr>, <time>, and <cite> are very important semantic tools that add meaning and accessibility to our content, but are unavailable without moving into the HTML editor. Microformats like hCard and hCalendar are unsupported. Even something as simple as proper use of rel attributes is difficult within the default editor.

How important is all of this? Do we consider semantics and machine-readability to be acceptable casualties for the ease we get by using a CMS? I don’t think so. With the increasing use of HTML5 and the emerging “app” mentality of web development (not to mention the old pillars of searchability, findability, and SEO), semantics and machine-parsing are more important than ever.

I can guarantee that CMS’s and blogging platforms aren’t going away, and I wouldn’t want them to. There’s no question that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for most web projects. Development time is always important, and as the web gets more social and conversational it will become increasingly important for writers and content managers to quickly and easily edit content without going through a lengthy content workflow.

So where does that leave us?

Perhaps the answer is simply to better educate the content managers on semantic HTML tags and proper use of the HTML editor. That would certainly be a great start. But in reality, it may be impractical to expect every writer and editor to be able to write properly formatted semantic HTML with microformats. It’s challenging to get web developers to do it right sometimes.

Maybe we need to insist that developers enter all content. From a workflow standpoint, this is hardly ideal, as developers add yet another (often expensive) step to the process, slowing down content deployment and eliminating one of they key reasons for using a platform like Wordpress in the first place. Additionally, most developers I know don’t exactly jump at the idea of doing content entry.

Maybe the answer is a smarter WYSIWYG editor. TinyMCE (Wordpress’s default editor) has dozens of configuration options. Maybe there are some additional elements buried in there somewhere. There are other editors out there, as well. Perhaps one of them has better support for semantic elements and microformats. Over the next few weeks, I intend to find out.

I don’t know the right answer, but I think the question deserves more thought than it’s currently being given.

Canon Consumer Products Page

While attempting to shop for a camera for my wife for Christmas today, I made my way over to canon.com. I selected “Products & Solutions” from the top global navigation and chose “Consumer” from the dropdown that appeared. I was taken to the page shown  on the right. So far, so good.

Since I was shopping for a point-and-shoot camera, I attempted to click the box labeled “Compact Digital Cameras.” No response.

I tried clicking the photo instead. Again, nothing.

I noticed that the cursor was not changing to a pointer. I tried mousing around the page hoping to see it change. Nothing.

I decided that perhaps Canon had built the page using some odd Javascript that didn’t work properly in Google Chrome, so I tried in Firefox. Same result. None.

I opened Firebug to see what was going on. As it turns out, the boxes were not buttons at all. It was simply a list of the Canon’s product categories.

Oh, this is what I'm supposed to do. At the very bottom of the page.

At this point I scrolled further down the page to see if there was something extra I was missing. Only then did I see the map graphic at the bottom of the page. In small white text was the message “Please access the Canon website of your country / region for further information on products.” With my window size, it had not been visible previously.

After selecting North America, I am given the choice of “Canada-French”, “Canada-English”, or “USA-English”. I select the US version, and am redirected to the Canon USA homepage.

So Many Questions

If they were not going to provide any product information on the global website, why have Product pages? Why make the list of products look so much like buttons if they’re not going to be clickable? Why not put the map at the top of the page? Better yet, if location is truly necessary, why not ask for it right away, before the user is several pages deep into the site? Once a user selects a country, why are they sent to the country’s homepage, rather than the section of the site they had been browsing on the global site? Did Canon do any user testing??

I’ve been using Canon cameras exclusively for years. I currently own 4, and plan to buy at least one more this year. But this experience was enough to get me over to nikon.com, where I had no problem finding several cameras that might end up under the tree this year.

I am a married, childless, 28-year old male who enjoys camping, cycling, and skiing. I currently rent my home. I have no need to see ads for dating sites, feminine hygiene products, or debt consolidation services. If advertisers can use my marketing profile to show me ads for camping products, ski vacations, and design books instead, everyone wins.

Ad-supported websites, apps, and digital services have to sell ads, with or without targeting. Without targeted profiles, these ads become less relevant to the user, which makes them less valuable to the advertiser. Therefore the content provider cannot charge as much for them. Meanwhile, the user is still seeing ads.  They’re just less useful and more annoying.

Advertising is how we get most of the free websites, apps, and services currently out there. Without the revenue that comes from high-value targeted ads, sites and services must respond by having more advertising (of the low-value, non-relevant variety) or by reducing free content.  I don’t want to see either.

This is especially irritating when the offender is a major media outlet (and this is almost always the case.) When I see a link posted by Outside Magazine, I should be able to safely assume it is a link to one of their articles. By taking me instead to their Facebook page, where I must click another link and open yet another tab, they are not only irritating me, they are betraying my expectations. They are weakening my trust in their brand.

Perhaps these media brands are trying to turn their Twitter followers into Facebook fans. I follow many more Twitter accounts than I have Facebook friends, and I assume there are others like me. But this feels to me like a cheat. I use Twitter because it’s faster and easier than wading through the comments and other cruft on Facebook.  By auto-posting from Facebook, these brands fail to respect the media preferences of their readers, creating a poor brand experience.

The lesson here? If you’re a media company, or run any sort of publishing or blog site, respect your readers’ media habits.  In addition to your RSS feed, post direct links on both Twitter and Facebook.  Most blogging and web publishing platforms now feature plugins or module that allow you to automatically do both, preventing the kind of cross-linking irritation that will eventually make your readers stop clicking your links altogether.

My personal theory has been that Flash support would make it too easy for developers to simply build browser-based apps in Flash while bypassing Apple’s App Store. Why give up a cut of your profits to Apple if you can run your own web-based service? But Manjoo has a different idea: Steve Jobs is betting on the rapid adoption of HTML5, and is hoping to render Flash irrelevant.

There’s plenty of evidence. Manjoo points to reports of a tirade in which Jobs called Adobe lazy and its programs too buggy for Apple to support. And Apple’s pioneering support of HTML5 in Safari 4 shows the company’s belief in the technology. They’re not the only ones, either. Google’s HTML5 implementation of Google Voice was developed after Apple rejected the iPhone version from the App Store, and YouTube recently launched a Flash-free HTML5 beta version.

I wish Jobs all the best. I’m no fan of Flash, and can’t wait until I’m able to heavily incorporate HTML5 and CSS3 into my work. The potential is enormous. But as someone who knows the realities of this business, I take a skeptical view. Millions of users still browse the web with Internet Explorer 6, a horrific dinosaur of a program that PC World named one of the ten worst tech products of all time. Even with browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Firefox beginning to offer decent HTLM5 support, it will be many years before it can be relied upon to replace Flash for video and interactivity.

In the meantime, it remains to be seen how the Apple/Flash battle plays out. Adobe offers an iPhone “packager” that converts a Flash app to an iPhone app. It seems likely that an iPad version with be coming soon. I fully expect many sites to develop HTML5 versions in the near future, and I truly hope that the iPad will speed its mainstream adoption. But in a world dominated by Microsoft browsers, I’m not holding my breath.

I’m hoping to use this blog as a means of exploring what’s possible using Wordpress. I recently read an article in Smashing Magazine entitled “Death of the Boring Blog Post.” An excellent read for developers and designers alike.

I truly doubt that I’ll be posting here all that regularly (that’s what Twitter is for), but when something comes up that I feel strongly about, or just want to share in more than 140 characters, this will be the place.